Aug. 9 marks the 30th anniversary of the internet’s Big Bang moment, an inflection point in the emergent digital world.

This Big Bang was the stunning stock market debut of Netscape Communications, maker of the first widely popular web browser, Netscape Navigator.

Netscape — a pitch-perfect name for a web pioneer — is at best a distant memory these days. But on August 9, 1995, Netscape took its shares public in an IPO that illuminated the online world, introducing the web to millions of people only vaguely familiar with the technology.

Netscape was a Silicon Valley startup whose IPO defined the audacity of the web’s early days. The company had been founded in 1994 by James H. Clark, he of Silicon Graphics fame, and Marc Andreessen, then a recent college graduate whom Newsweek magazine was soon to call the “über-super-wunder whiz kid of cyberspace.”

Although its founders were colorful, the company had been a money-loser during the months before its IPO. Its Navigator browser, however, was user-friendly and becoming a preferred gateway to the early web.

Clark, Andreessen, and Netscape’s gentlemanly chief executive, James Barksdale, went on a multicity roadshow to pitch the company to would-be investors in the weeks preceding the IPO. There was, it turned out, no scarcity of interested........

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